a. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains generally to serviceable electronic equipment and specifically to indicators useful for identifying partially disassembled serviceable components.
b. Description of the Background
In many electronic systems, a subassembly may be removed from an enclosure to provide access so that various replaceable or serviceable elements may be exchanged. When the subassembly is removed from the enclosure and disconnected from a power source and a host controller, a failed item may be difficult to identify for servicing. Further, a report or other documentation may need to accompany the subassembly to inform a service technician which item requires replacement or service. Such documentation may be misplaced and confusing.
In an example of a disk based storage system, such as a RAID system, each individual disk drive may be a serviceable element. In some RAID systems, several disk drives may be mounted in a subassembly that is mounted inside an enclosure, such as a standalone enclosure or a rack mounted enclosure. When a service technician removes a multi-disk subassembly to replace one or more of the disk drives, the technician needs to identify the proper disk drive for replacement. The technician may receive a report from a host controller that indicates the specific drive to be serviced, but such a report may be difficult to interpret.
The correct determination of the replaceable element is important for proper servicing. In a RAID example, if the technician replaces the incorrect disk drive, data stored on that disk drive may be lost.
When the service has been completed, a host controller may need to perform initialization, testing, or configuration of newly replaced elements. In a RAID example, a replaced disk drive may be rebuilt with data from other drives. In such an example, downtime may also be reduced by indicating to the host controller which replaceable elements have been serviced so that the host controller may assume that the non-replaced elements contain good data.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a system and method for indicating the status of serviceable elements on a subassembly when the subassembly is disconnected from a host device. It would be further advantageous to provide such a system that was simple, low cost, and provided some feedback when the service was complete.